{"id":40541,"date":"2022-07-18T19:35:43","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T17:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/?page_id=40541"},"modified":"2022-07-18T19:35:43","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T17:35:43","slug":"sample-translation-deepdeepblue","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/foreignrights\/authors\/nikki-dekker\/nikki-dekker-deepdeepblue\/sample-translation-deepdeepblue\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample translation – deepdeepblue<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nikki Dekker – deepdeepblue<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

MERMAID<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love taxidermy, stuffed animals, especially when the details are not realistic. A lion with the bulging eyeballs of a doll, its lips drawn into a curve meant to look like a smile. A fox sitting in a chair, its rear legs crossed like a lady\u2019s, in the very same style that Anne Hathaway learns from her grandma in The Princess Diaries<\/em>. They don\u2019t even have to be botched jobs. There\u2019s a white mouse for sale on Etsy, wearing a turban and holding up the Magician card from a Tarot deck. Its tail makes a stylized curl. Next to its paw are a crystal ball and a Ouija board. Add to cart<\/em>.<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

I follow Vicky along damp brick walls through the murky darkness. We\u2019re in London, in the deserted tunnels beneath Waterloo Station. People call them tunnels, but they\u2019re more like halls with arched ceilings, lit by red and purple spotlights. They\u2019ve been deserted for years, but tonight they\u2019re the site of a festival. We make our way through a cramped half pipe to the bar, a stack of empty beer crates with a sheet of wood on top. Vicky strides up to the two women who are leaning against it, deep in conversation, martinis in their hands. One woman has her face hidden by a basketball cap. The other is wearing a man\u2019s suit, without a shirt. I can see her reddish-brown bra. Vicky runs her index finger along the edge of the jacket, then along the d\u00e9colletage. \u201cHello, sweetheart,\u201d she says in a low voice. \u201cWhat a delicious surprise to see you here.\u201d One of Vicky\u2019s exes. One of the many.<\/p>\n

We order two glasses of white and move on. Popcorn is being sold from huge dispensers. A couple of girls in the corner are twirling a hula hoop. This is how I pictured the big city as a small-town teenager, hanging out next to the car factory to listen in for free to the echoes of the annual pop festival. I run my hand along the bricks. They feel damp like cave walls that conceal smaller corridors around every corner. The next time a corridor branches off to one side, I follow it. A man is seated on a high stool, or leaning on it, really, one foot still on the floor. He gestures at the PowerPoint slide projected on the bricks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is this?\u201d he asks. Someone shouts, \u201cA mermaid!\u201d The audience laughs. The man nods. \u201cBelieve it or not, this is my specialty. I study mermaids.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man\u2019s name is Paolo Viscardi, and he\u2019s brought a variety of mermaids with him. They\u2019re smaller than I had imagined, the size of a chihuahua or a small dachshund. One is lifting up her arms and has her mouth wide open as if she\u2019s screaming. Another appears to be holding herself up on her forearms, dragging her tail behind her. The last one is balancing on her tail and holding a shriveled, mummified hand to her bun of flaxen hair. Once Viscardi has put his mermaids on display, he begins his story.<\/p>\n

A human slices off the upper half of a monkey\u2019s skeleton and attaches the backbone to the tail of a large fish. Look: a mermaid. Now the mythical being can be admired even by the landlubbers who have never set foot on a ship. It\u2019s not entirely clear where the tradition of the Fiji mermaid began, but it seems to have come from the Japanese. They molded little creatures out of clay, twigs, and the tails and teeth of fish and sold them to visiting Western merchants, who took them home as souvenirs, as tangible evidence of their great overseas adventures.<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

I rummage in the pocket of my trousers for loose change for the copy machine. As soon I stop feeding it coins, it will stop working, and I have at least thirty pages to go. Already I\u2019m having doubts about the title\u2014despite all the thought I put into it, all the time I spent cutting each letter from the newspaper. Not everything is lined up perfectly straight, but maybe that makes it more compelling, more authentic. I pick up a page and hold it to the light. The other side shines through.<\/p>\n

Someone comes up behind me, very close, and puts her hands over my eyes. \u201cHow does it look now?\u201d she whispers in my ear.<\/p>\n

Vicky lets go of me and steps back, laughing. I can feel my face turn red. We sit next to each other in philosophy of science, but we\u2019ve never really talked, aside from last week when all of us went out for drinks after class, and there she was, perched on the arm of my chair. She made it look effortless.<\/p>\n

The mood that night was strange. We went around the circle, and each of my classmates named their favorite Great Author. Dostoevsky, Proust, Kundera.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m kind of going through a Young Adult phase,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

Someone rose his eyebrows. Someone looked away to make eye contact with someone else.<\/p>\n

\u201cUh,\u201d I continued, \u201cJohn Green, for example. It\u2019s really pretty interesting how his work relates to the stereotypes in teen series.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOK,\u201d Mart said next to me. \u201cMy turn. I can\u2019t believe no one\u2019s mentioned William Blake yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vicky poked me gently in the side and whispered, \u201cDFTBA.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cCool,\u201d she says now, pointing at the stack of pages next to the copier. Collages, pamphlets, cryptic poetry. Little zines I leave behind in caf\u00e9s and libraries. This time, the old Titanic <\/em>movie poster is lying on top: Kate and Leo at the top, with the prow of a ship threatening to drive them apart. It has the same shape as the shark in the Jaws <\/em>poster, rising menacingly from the deep.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy ex-girlfriend read tons of John Green,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat matters to you defines your mattering.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same quote I\u2019ve put up over my desk, in colored marker on a sheet of printer paper. I stare at her, astounded. She grins. \u201cHey, my parents have a little place outside the city. I go there a lot on weekends to get high and paint. I\u2019m going on Friday. Why don\u2019t you come along?\u201d<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

It was my favorite movie as a child. I can still hear the exact melody in my head, right at the start, when the first seagulls break through the clouds and glide just above the surface of the sea on their way to the ship. Ari\u00ebl, the red-headed mermaid, dwells between two worlds. She lives with her father and sister in a palace at the bottom of the sea, but she longs for the world above water, where the people are. I see her sitting on the rock like the bronze statue in Copenhagen as the waves break over her back, and I hear her singing, \u201cI want more.\u201d<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

At ten o\u2019clock in the morning, I\u2019m standing next to the sliding doors of the supermarket across the street from the station, carrying a full gym bag and a plastic bag. We buy baguettes, pasta, canned beans, and two large bags of chips. Laden like camels, we shuffle across the concourse. Vicky is wearing one backpack on her back and another on her belly. She has a bag full of stuff in each hand. As soon as we flop into our seats, she puts on her headphones: \u201cDon\u2019t worry, not about you.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing I like more than sitting across from someone on the train without talking, and staring outside while my music plays at the yellow and orange fields rushing by like strips of color. And then Vicky\u2019s reflection layered over them in the window.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vicky takes the key from the lockbox and points at a rocking chair on the porch. \u201cYou wait here,\u201d she says. \u201cI never know what I\u2019ll find when I come here.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just settled in when she brings me a glass of cola and a magazine. \u201cI\u2019ll just have a flit round the place with the feather duster. If you keep very quiet, Prince Charles might drop by. That\u2019s what we call the stag who wanders around here. He has fangs.\u201d<\/p>\n

I look out over the wide lawn that sprawls all the way to the stream, bordered on either side by rosebushes and hydrangeas. I would never have suspected that Vicky, with her thin, grubby ponytail and her purple tie-dye T-shirt, was rich. And rich in such a very English way: a country house with a veranda, a solarium, and a feather duster for having a flit round the place.<\/p>\n

When she points me to my room so that I can put down my bag and freshen up, there\u2019s a glass of water with a slice of lemon on the nightstand, beside a chocolate bar and a large daisy in an old beer bottle. I think to myself, She\u2019s really taking care of me. And I think, Why can\u2019t I share her bedroom with her?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The author of the original fairy tale is a Dane from the nineteenth century: Hans Christian Andersen. His unhappy love life begins at an early age. Time after time, he is rejected.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re like a brother to me,\u201d girls tell him.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that Hans is such a shy, retiring boy, who has a hard time relating to other people and prefers unattainable women. As if that isn\u2019t bad enough, when he gets older, he starts falling in love with men too. He writes torrid letters to his friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cI long for you as if you were a magnificent Calabrian woman,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy feelings for you are those of a woman,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Wanting what you can\u2019t have, that\u2019s the little mermaid\u2019s story. In the Disney movie, her friends try to lead her back on the straight and narrow.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t you know what humans do?\u201d they keep asking Ari\u00ebl. \u201cThey eat fish! They\u2019ll never understand you. Look how beautiful it is here, under the sea! Can\u2019t you just be content with that?\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what countless children have heard from their parents: Why can\u2019t you just be normal? You\u2019re too young to learn about things like that! I want you to have a more comfortable life, here, with us.<\/p>\n

Home isn\u2019t enough. Ari\u00ebl gives up her voice and her tail to win over the prince she loves.<\/p>\n

From this point on, the two versions part ways. In the Disneyverse, which is all about individual freedom and meritocracy, everything ends well. In Andersen\u2019s fairy tale, the little mermaid dies when her prince marries someone else and disintegrates like foam on the sea.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI want to draw your portrait,\u201d she says. \u201cWill you do me<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

We sit opposite each other at the table with a disorderly pile of crayons and colored pencils between us and look each other straight in the eyes. She turns aside for a second to change the radio station. Cheesy music plays. \u201cFor inspiration,\u201d she says with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Maybe she presses her tongue between her lips as she sketches, maybe she stares out intently from under her brow, like Leonardo in Titanic<\/em>. What I know for certain is that her face is moving way too much\u2014every few seconds, the mood changes completely\u2014but I don\u2019t dare ask her to relax, because I want to capture her the way she is, not the face she puts on for the camera. As for me, I do my very best not to twist my mouth into a grimace. I know how I look when I draw. I\u2019ve seen the photos.<\/p>\n

Profane mumbling. \u201cI just can\u2019t find a style of my own,\u201d she protests, sliding her drawing toward me. I can hardly recognize it as a person, let alone as myself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m searching for a kind of tonal quality, a… melody on paper. Or something.\u201d She snatches back the drawing, crumples it, and tosses the wad into the wastepaper basket. Then she\u2019s off, her sketchbook under her arm, through the open door out onto the grass. By the stream, she collapses in a heap and begins sketching furiously, as if she\u2019d never stopped. I look at my drawing, I look at her, so far away.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey,\u201d I shout, \u201cThink I\u2019ll go for a run.\u201d<\/p>\n

She waves. \u201cSay hi to Charles!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The garden has no bounds, no fence or curb. It liberates something in my lungs. With every step I think of Vicky. Vicky, who isn\u2019t afraid to ask the instructor critical questions. Vicky, who goes out on a Tuesday night and shows up for class on Wednesday. Vicky, who scribbles line drawings of clouds and frogs. Vicky, who has a girlfriend, an older woman with red lipstick who waits for her at the exit after class. Vicky\u2019s arm around her waist. The rhythmic slap of my old sneakers on the mucky soil.<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

Where does desire come from? Is it in you from birth, just waiting to surface, like a predator’s hunting instinct? Whenever I see water, even if it’s only a brown, unsightly urban waterway, I feel a twinge in my belly\u2014that’s where I’m supposed to be.<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

The weekend repeats itself and repeats itself and repeats itself. In the summer we hunt mosquitoes, in the winter we stoke the fire, wrap ourselves in blankets, and drink mulled wine. As time passes, the weekends move to other cities and countries: we eat ice cream in an Amsterdam alley, we draw the bridge with all the padlocks in Cologne, we smoke a joint on the sidewalk in front of Notre-Dame. Every place feels familiar when she\u2019s there. But she is never mine. There are tourists we meet, distant acquaintances she wants to visit, people who are nothing more to me than the extras on the fringes of a painting. They stand there, filling up the canvas, but I don\u2019t even glance at them, because I\u2019m in the center with her. To Vicky, each one is a friend she has yet to meet. I wish she could see that all those other people are just distractions, that this is about us, that the two of us together are the real work of art.<\/p>\n

But for now we\u2019re still here in the solarium, eating pasta with cream cheese and cherry tomatoes, drinking expensive wine from the cabinet stocked by her parents.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne bottle,\u201d Vicky says. \u201cThey won\u2019t notice a thing.\u201d And later, \u201cOne more, they\u2019ll never know.\u201d<\/p>\n

We drink until she starts rolling the blunt. After that, we laugh at the garden gnome, the train trip, our own social awkwardness. We laugh until we get hungry and polish off our second course: Jaffa Cakes. Then she looks at me with twinkling eyes:<\/p>\n

\u201cTime for a dip. You heard me, girl. We\u2019re going skinny-dipping. Get those clothes off.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the fleeting light of the cars driving by in the distance, I follow her, her chubby butt, naked, her back, naked, her shoulders, and those bare legs in high boots. I curl my toes. The boots she gave me are one size too small. They\u2019re sucked into the soil, deeper and deeper, as we near the stream.<\/p>\n

Her breasts bob in the black water, glowing in the dark.<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

Hans Christian Andersen has fallen head over heels in love with a prince of his own: Edvard Collin. It\u2019s to him that Hans writes his most heartfelt letters, for him that he aches and hungers. Hans describes at length how he took a rose to bed with him, kissed the bud passionately, and hid it away under his cushion. Edvard ignores most of Hans\u2019s letters, replying now and then that Hans would be better off putting all that energy into his plays and stories. When Hans receives a letter from Edvard telling him he values his friendship, he boils over with rage:<\/p>\n

Why do you call me your \u201cesteemed friend\u201d? I don\u2019t want to be esteemed! That\u2019s the most boring, insipid word you could use. Any idiot can be esteemed!<\/p>\n

&<\/p>\n

Four times I declared my love to her.<\/p>\n

The first time she sighed, clasped my hand, reassured me, said it didn\u2019t matter, that unfortunately she didn\u2019t feel the same way about me, but it didn\u2019t have to get in the way of our friendship, don\u2019t be absurd, of course not, the two of us will go away for another weekend soon.<\/p>\n

The second time she knitted her eyebrows and asked if I was sure, if by any chance I was clinging to her because I felt alone and insecure, and because she brought out a side of me that I could be proud of\u2014in other words, if I wasn\u2019t really more in love with myself.<\/p>\n

The third time she shook her head, wrapped her arms around me, and whispered in my ear, \u201cDarling, we\u2019ve already been over this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNot that again,\u201d she said the last time. She laughed and poked me in the side. \u201cCome on, cut it out. Want to light up?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vicky knew then what I figured out only years and years later: it\u2019s not about the prince, it\u2019s about his life. The dancing hair and the unbuttoned white shirt are appealing, but what you really want is to leap inside the prince\u2019s carriage, dangle upside down through the door to watch the hooves hitting the sandy path, ride to market to see the cackling chickens, clap at the Punch and Judy show, and dance in the square. Not to be stuck in the water anymore but to glide across the surface in a rowboat, paddling through a weeping willow\u2019s leaf-green curtain as the sun goes down and the birds sing. To make it there, you need the prince, and to be allowed to stay, you need his kiss.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by David McKay<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nikki Dekker – deepdeepblue   MERMAID I love taxidermy, stuffed animals, especially when the details are not realistic. A lion with the bulging eyeballs of a doll, its lips drawn into a curve meant to look like a smile. A fox sitting in a chair, its rear legs crossed like a lady\u2019s, in the very…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3251,"featured_media":0,"parent":40531,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-40541","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/3251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40541\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}